In 1964 it was Goldwater's temperament:
LBJ "Daisy Ad" political commercial, aired September 7, 1964
"I just shudder to think what would happen if Goldwater won it. He's a man that's had two nervous breakdowns. He's not a stable fellow at all."
— President Lyndon B. Johnson to Texas Governor John Connally, from a 7/23/64 White House telephone tape recording
LINK - AUDIO
In 2008 it is McCain's temperament:
"He [John McCain] would blow up and go off like a Roman candle at any possible time."
"The world is such a dangerous place and he has shown himself already to be bellicose. John McCain is not somebody that I would like to see with his finger near the red button."
"John McCain's temperament makes it clear that he's not cut out to be president of the United States."
— Fellow POW Phillip Butler, from the latest film by Robert Greenwald (Brave New Films)
Democrats take aim at McCain’s temper
From POLITICO, 8/26/08
DENVER — John McCain’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate are zeroing in on his oft-discussed temper, questioning whether the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is too volatile to be commander in chief.
In separate interviews with Politico on Tuesday, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said they have seen McCain "explode."
"He has a huge anger problem," Boxer said. "And he never hid that. ... I have seen it happen on the Senate floor many, many times. ... He has exploded at me a couple times."
"It’s all well and good to apologize," Boxer added, "but if you are in charge of that black box, I worry about that."
Durbin noted McCain’s temper is "well documented," saying that he had been on the receiving end of it for what he considered "minor things."
"I was in a confrontation with him ... and he was quick to explode," said Durbin. "It simmered for a long time."
Republicans have accused Democrats of inventing the temper line of attack to knock the Arizona senator. But Durbin called it "an important issue."
Boxer pointed out that many of McCain’s GOP colleagues have also spoken out about his volatility, highlighting an incident told to the Biloxi Sun Herald by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.).
Cochran told the newspaper that he watched McCain get involved in a physical confrontation with a Nicaraguan government official during a 1987 trip there. According to Cochran, McCain grabbed the official by the shirt collar and "snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair."
Can McCain Control His Temper?
A McClatchy article this weekend on John McCain and his potential inability to control his temper raises serious concerns about his fitness to be President with a finger on the nuclear button.
Whether in negotiations over Senate legislation with his own party members or in confrontation with Democrats, McCain often shows himself to be, at the least, confrontational. For instance, in a behind the scenes committee meeting on immigration reform with Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R):
McCain called Cornyn's claim "chicken-s---," according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.
"F--- you," McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.
It was another instance of the Republican presidential candidate losing his temper, another instance where, as POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka put it, "It's his way or no way."
Another set of incidents documented by McClatchy occurred in the 90s and involved physical contact with concerned citizens... including one in a wheelchair:
about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.
Six people present have written statements describing what they saw. According to the accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.
As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, the mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.
"McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him," according to Eleanor Apodaca, the sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967.
Other incidents are described in the article:
Stories abound on Capitol Hill: How McCain told Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., how "only an a-hole" would craft a budget like he did. Or the time in 1989 when he confronted Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, then a Democrat and now a Republican, because Shelby had promised to vote for McCain friend John Tower as secretary of defense, and then Shelby voted against Tower.
McCain later wrote how, after the vote, he approached Shelby "to bring my nose within an inch of his as I screamed out my intense displeasure over his deceit ... the incident is one of the occasions when my temper lived up to its exaggerated legend."
America Against The World
By Andrew Sullivan, 8/27/08
The op-ed in today's WSJ by the McCain duo of Lieberman and Graham is far more important for this election, it seems to me, than parsing the dynamics of the Clinton-Obama marriage. What they are laying out in very clear terms is the agenda of a McCain presidency. The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan.
It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.
If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose.
In my view, the fear card has only one truly compelling target in this election: McCain.
"Daisy Ad" Remembered
The year was 1964. Lyndon Johnson (D) was running against Barry Goldwater (R) for the presidency of the United States. I personally saw LBJ's "Daisy Ad" political commercial on TV back in 1964 when it originally aired on September 7, 1964 (I was 12 years old then.) It scared me back in 1964, and it still gives me an icy horrific chill now (sort of like how the film "Blair Witch Project" does), and that is not by accident.
In a July 20, 1964 telephone conversation (LINK - AUDIO), Johnson's press secretary George Reedy provided to Johnson what may have been the initial seed of the idea to tap into the fears of voters on a gut visceral level that eventually became the Johnson campaign's "Daisy Ad" initiative:
"Now, I think there's a weakness to Goldwater. I think the big weakness is that people think he's pretty reckless. And I think the one thing that we ought to get at now is some of the things that he has said about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but not say it in the way that it has been said. I think we gotta get this thing down to some gut things: Mothers that are worried about having radioactive poison in their kids' milk. Men that are worried about becoming sterile. Uh, give them some thoughts about maybe kids being born with two heads and things like that, and that my God you're going to have this reckless man who shoots from the hip and who talks first and thinks afterwards."
If one did not know any better, one would think that George Reedy was talking today about John McCain in 2008!
To fully appreciate the "Daisy Ad", you have to understand that 1964 was still very much a Cold War year filled with fear of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviets, considering that just 2 years earlier there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the entire nation thought that we were on the brink of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviets.
And of course, just 1 year earlier President Kennedy had been horrifically assassinated, so 1964 was very much a year where there was a lot of public fear & uncertainty around to readily tap into, because the end of the world was a very real possibility for most Americans and not just an abstract concept. I personally remember seeing numerous episodes of the popular "Twilight Zone" series circa 1962-1964 that had the recurring general theme of what a post-nuclear-war world would be like, fallout shelters, escaping a nuclear war, etc.
The "Daisy Ad" never used Goldwater’s name or image, yet viewers understood its central message: that Goldwater might use atomic weapons. The ad advanced the idea that Goldwater could not be trusted with his finger on the button, and the ad did not have to explicitly name Goldwater, because Goldwater had already established himself publically as a hawk who might use nuclear weapons in Europe and Vietnam, so all the Johnson campaign had to do was bring the horror of that use into the American living room on a gut visceral level, and let the American public make the connection to Goldwater.
The ad accomplished two things at once: it implicitly framed Goldwater as a reckless person who might somehow cause some sort of atomic conflict, while simultaneously framing Johnson as a responsible, peace-loving custodian of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
The ad was aired by the Johnson campaign proper only once, on September 7, 1964, during the NBC Monday Night Movie telecast of "David and Bathsheba", and the following night all three network news broadcasts showed the ad in its entirety.
The estimated audience for the ad's first airing was 50 million viewers. A Harris Poll taken a week after the ad first aired reported that 53% of women and 45% of men believed that Goldwater would involve the United States in a war.
The Johnson campaign’s advertising strategy worked: Johnson won in a landslide, and post-election polls indicated that many people voted less in favor of Johnson and more out of fear of Goldwater.
The Bill Moyers of PBS fame was in 1964 Johnson's "Special Assistant to the President" who oversaw various aspects of the 1964 campaign. On September 13, 1964, Bill Moyers wrote a memo to Johnson that summarized the intended strategy behind the "Daisy Ad" and how pleased the campaign was with its impact:
Mr. President:
While most of our radio-television campaign is to project you and your record, we decided - - - as you may recall - - - to run a few earlier spots just to "touch up" Goldwater a bit and remind people that he is not as moderate as his recent speeches want them to believe he is. The idea was not to let him get away with building a moderate image and to put him on the defensive before the campaign is very old.
I think we succeeded in our first spot - - - the one on the control of nuclear weapons.
It caused his people to start defending him right away. Yesterday (Republican National Committee Chairman) Burch said: "This ad implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man." Well, that's exactly what we wanted to imply. And we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us. They did. Yesterday was spent in trying to show that Goldwater isn't reckless.
Furthermore, while we paid for the ad only on NBC last Monday night, ABC and CBS ran it on their news shows Friday. So we got it shown on all three networks for the price of one.
This particular ad was designed to run only one time. We have a few more Goldwater ads, none as hard-hitting as that one was, and then we go to the pro-Johnson, pro-Peace, Prosperity, Preparedness spots.
Bill Moyers
PS: Somebody with the right inside channels, please get this diary to the Obama campaign. Let's leave nothing to chance.
DIARY POLL QUESTION BELOW: Should the Dems make McCain's volatile angry temperament and war mongering attitude a major campaign issue, the way that the Johnson campaign did with Goldwater and the "Daisy Ad" back in 1964?
CREDITS; "Daisy Ad" information resources utilized for this diary:
DAISY: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF AN INFAMOUS AND ICONIC AD
Daisy television advertisement Wikipedia
What Else Do You Need To Know To Analyze an Ad?